New journal article:

Assessment as a learning process: the use of Exploratory Practice to empower students and to foster teacher development

Anabel Gutierrez, Assia Slimani-Rolls, Chris Rowell

Resumo

The purpose of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, it presents a yearlong study (2016-2017) that reports on the design and implementation of a module assessment through a peer review process(BOSTOCK, 2000;TOPPING 2000; FALCHIKOV, 2005) Using Turnitin, which is a commercial, Internet-Based Plagiarism-Detection Service. The peer review aims to help the students to understand the marking criteria and standards, which are focused on the development of research skills and encourage them to take control of their learning. The peer reviewprocesses representthe formative feedback that students give to each other to enable them to achieve the required standard that their work must ultimately reach prior to its final submission. On the other hand, the paper also highlights the professional development issues that emerged as a consequence of adopting the principled framework of Exploratory Practice (EP) (ALLWRIGHT, 2003, 2005; GIEVE &MILLER, 2006; ALLWRIGHT &HANKS, 2009), which Allowed the teacher and the students to work for a better quality of life,as they enhanced theirunderstandings of what they were trying to achieve together in the classroom. A number of benefits have been identified as a result of this investigation. The students gained a better grasp of the literature review process, heightened their motivation to learn about the topics that they need to investigate,engaged more deeply students’ engagement during lectures, and developed a sense of ownership of their learning. The teacherherself voices her reflection about the perceivedbenefitsgained from working collaboratively with students and with experts in related fields and finds that the process has generated insightsthat have transformedher teaching in various ways.

Like this:

Last week I did a quick workshop on using the new Turnitin app to mark assignments. I started with the ‘Potential benefits of using the app’ and perhaps the most important advantage is the ability to mark ‘off line’. So many lecturers I meet are really impressed with the Grademark marking tool in Turnitin but what they find frustrating is that up until now they are tied to their pc if they want to do any marking. The new app will allow lecturers to download their students assignments to their iPad and then mark them anywhere they want and then when they return to the wifi upload them to the VLE …great news just what everyone’s been asking for – well done Turnitin!

Open one of you students assignments and click on the second icon on the bottom left of the screen.

This will give you the ‘Turnitin for iPad Class Access Code’.

Take a record of the Access Code.

2. From the Apps Store download the Turnitin app to your iPad.

Once the app is loaded click on the app and enter your ‘Access Code’

3. You will now see your assignment submission areas on the left of your screen.

Click on the assignment submission area you want.

4. To ‘upload’ the assignment to your iPad so you can mark them ‘off line’ click on the ‘cloud icon’

5. Open the student’s assignment.

You will now see two icons on the top left of the screen.

The ‘pen’ icon will take you to the place to enter the overall grade/comment and voice comment.

The ‘graph’ icon will take you to the originality report.

6. When you open the originality report – You must first ‘switch it on’ so that it goes green.

7. When you open the overall comments page you have three options

Enter grade

Add overall comment

Add voice comment.

This is all very easy to use BUT there is one major problem – when you create new ‘bubble comments’ and then put them into sets (using the pc version) you CANNOT access these comments on the app – very frustrating! Hopefully Turintin will get round to fixing this issue.

In conclusion, a great app that could make the marking process a little bit easier!

Like this:

The new season of ‘Tricks of the Trade’ has a theme of ‘How to get the most out of your iPad’.

Wednesday 12th February

Room D03

13.00 – 1400.

The first session kicks off with a short demonstration on how to use the new Turnitin app on a iPad.The Turinitin app enables you to ‘download’ assignments from Regent’s Blackboard and then you can use the Turnitin tools to see the originally report, use the text/bubble comments and leave overall feedback and a grade.

Also, you can use the app ‘off line’ which enables you to do marking without a wifi connection.

Like this:

Yesterday myself and James Leahy (VLE Content Developer) did a short iPad workshop for academics here at Regent’s University. It was just a short one hour session where we covered some useful ipad features and then looked at some relevant apps (Blackboard Mobile, Prezi, Turnitin, Rosetta Stone).Here are the slides we used: